Could Social Media Have Stopped Sandusky?

Does the case of Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State defensive football coach who is on trial for sexually abusing or raping ten children, show that we are getting better as a culture, or worse? Maureen Dowd, in the Times, sees it as a sign of our era’s declines, asking whether “with formerly hallowed institutions and icons sinking into a moral dystopia all around us, has our sense of right and wrong grown more malleable?”

Inundated by instantaneous information and gossip, do we simply know more about the seamy side? Do greater opportunities and higher stakes cause more instances of unethical behavior? Have our materialism, narcissism and cynicism about the institutions knitting society—schools, sports, religion, politics, banking—dulled our sense of right and wrong?

She then quotes the author of a book called “The Death of Character,” who also complains about how “we no longer trust the authority of traditional institutions,” and Cory Booker, who tells her that his run into a burning building last month was an act of resistance against “consumerism and narcissism and me-ism” and “shallow celebrity” culture.

But this is a puzzling perspective. The cases Dowd discusses—Sandusky, the Catholic Church’s child-sex-abuse scandal, recent revelations about Horace Mann—involved crimes and misdemeanors that went on for years or decades, hidden by the “hallowed” status of schools or sports or religion, and that we’ve finally, more recently exposed. This feels like progress. When is the “then” when everyone was good? (Dowd mentions Thomas More, but the sixteenth century wasn’t actually utopia.) The narrative of the past few years seems less about “sinking into moral dystopia” than about the draining away of a swamp that hid bad behavior. It’s lately that we’ve learned to stand up to, say, bishops protecting abusive priests, and to not to tolerate that sort of crime any more. If cynicism about such institutions means not trusting them to police themselves, it has sharpened, not dulled, our sense of right and wrong. We have, if anything, been more engaged than ever with the question of accountability—and that’s good.

Sandusky, too, was endured and shielded for years, which is why some of the witnesses now testifying about him are now in their late twenties, and one of the defense’s main angles, outlined as it opened its case Wednesday, is expected to be that they can no longer say the exact day or even, in some cases, year in which they were groped or raped in a car or a basement. In 1998, all that came of allegations was a tip to Sandusky from the police that taking showers with children was a bad idea. But a decade later, another set of allegations was actually heeded, investigated, and resulted in a prosecution. (Sandusky has pleaded not guilty.)

And it was a culture of “instantaneous information” that helped do Sandusky in. The unravelling came when the child known as Victim 1 asked his mother how to find a registry of sex offenders online: “I wanted to see if Jerry was on there.” He wasn’t, but the question woke the boy’s mother up. The older witnesses in the trial talked about feeling, as children, that they were entirely alone—that it was just them and Sandusky, behind a closed door. Victim 1, who is now just eighteen, had a sense that he could put his loneliness to the test by turning on a computer, and that he might learn, there, that he wasn’t isolated after all. He also seems to have had a sense—in the way that young people in any number of countries have—that even a powerful person can be challenged or exposed online. That is a pretty good thing, too.

Social media also meant that when the indictments finally came down, the pressure on Penn State’s board, including from alumni Facebook groups, was unrelenting; Graham Spanier, the university’s president, lost his job. It can force people to act ethically, rather than encourage unethical acts. Evan Osnos wrote last week about the husband in China who used his iPhone to take a picture of his wife, who had been subjected to a coerced abortion, and put it on Weibo, China’s Twitter. (Is it “narcissism ” to believe the world would care, or humanitarianism?) Knowing that any number of people in a crowd have a camera and a broadcast tool is a powerful corrective.

What if all the boys had had phones on them they could have used to text to their friends or record or tweet about what was happening? Mike McQueary, an assistant coach, testified that he fled from the sight of Sandusky raping a child—this happened in 2001, though Dowd points to it as a sign of contemporary decline. The boy in question has never been identified; the Penn State officials McQueary spoke to never tried to find out who he was. Dowd quite rightly notes that McQueary, a tall former quarterback, could have rushed over and pulled the child away. But what if his culture-honed instinct had been to at least take an iPhone out of his pocket, and snap a picture? You don’t have to be a football player to keep a child from being faceless.

Photograph of Mike McQueary by Gene J. Puskar/AP.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.